The president has
credited Twitter with his election to the highest office in the land.

To a certain kind of
nerd, Ev Williams is the Forrest Gump of internet media. Williams helped write
the software that made us call blogs blogs. He founded a podcast company
years before most people listened to them. He sent Twitter’s
75th tweet, then ran the company. And now he’s the founder and CEO
of Medium, the platform for online writing embraced by sportswriters, Silicon
Valley executives, and the President of the United States.

Williams believes
social platforms tend to encourage deviant and antisocial behaviors, expressing
his regret when it came to Donald Trump’s victory.

“I think the
internet is broken,” he says. He has believed this for a few years, actually.
But things are getting worse. “And it’s a lot more obvious to a lot of people
that it’s broken.”

People are using Facebook to showcase suicides,
beatings and murder, in real time. Twitter is a hive of trolling and abuse that
it seems unable to stop. Fake news, whether created for ideology or profit,
runs rampant. Four out of 10 adult internet users said in a Pew
survey that they had been harassed online. And that was before
the presidential campaign heated up last year.

“I thought once
everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is
automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong
about that.”

The American entrepreneur reached this conclusion for a while now but
the situation became even worse.

‘It’s more and more
clear that the Internet is broken’, pinpointed the tech expert.

Considering that,
these days, people use Facebook or Instagram to broadcast homicides, rapes and
aggression live, the fact that the Internet is not exactly the safest place
it’s pretty clear.

Meanwhile, Twitter
transformed into this network of cynical, harassing and abusive comment.

Fake news, created
to promote wrong ideologies or to generate profit are daily occurrences.

Four from ten adults
who use the internet revealed that, at least once in their life, they’ve been
harassed online.

‘I thought that, if
people are able to express themselves freely, the world will become a better
place. I was wrong’, added Williams.

‘The problem with
the internet is the fact that it encourages everything thst is extreme. For
example, you drive on a highway and you notice a car crash. You tend to stare.
Everyone stares. However, the
internet interprets this behavior like the people would want
to see more crashes’, explained the Twitter co-founder.

The trouble with the
internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving
down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The
internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car
crashes, so it tries to supply them.. His goal is to break this pattern. “If I
learn that every time I drive down this road I’m going to see more and more car
crashes,” he says, “I’m going to take a different road.”

But a new road may have other problems. It may, for instance, be a dead end./.

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President Trump has said he believes Twitter put him in the White House. Recently, Mr. Williams heard the claim for the first time. He mulled it over for a bit, “It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” he said finally. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”